September 10, 2025 - Brooklyn Downtown Star

Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner!

BQE Admin on September 10, 2025

A new spot, Badaboom, brings ritzy rotisserie to Bed-Stuy

By Cole Sinanian

Take an evening stroll through eastern Bed-Stuy and you may happen upon an aggressively blue facade on the corner of Howard Ave and Bainbridge Street, lined with equally blue sidewalk seating and likely bursting with youngsters vying for a table.

This is Badaboom, a new chicken-forward bistro opened by Charles Gerbier of the nearby Frog Wine Bar and Henry Glucroft of the popular Henry’s wine shop in Bushwick. Despite just a few months on the block, the restaurant — open for dinner only — is generating some buzz. Its $38 steak frites, in particular, have cultivated quite the reputation— Brooklyn Magazine and The Infatuation both gushed about the seven ounces of marbled red flap steak and thick-cut fries.

But ordering steak at a place with doodles of chickens all over its walls seems like the wrong thing to do, particularly when, upon entry, one is confronted with a spectacular rotisserie oven stacked with roasting birds leaking savory juices everywhere. The open kitchen— placed where one might expect a bar to be — is an effective theatrical touch. Diners can marvel at the skeleton crew of just two cooks and a dishwasher holding it all down. They work in silence, slicing up birds with scissors or pouring butter emulsions from steel pots over haricot vert.

Badaboom’s signature offering is its rotisserie chicken, but it also grabs diners with the spectacle of its open-kitchen plan.

The spectacle is entertainment for the wayward lone diner, who may be feeling out-of-place in a room filled with what look like some of Bed-Stuy’s hottest second dates. They skew young, dressed in leather and salvaged denim, well-fitted pants and designer tees. Do they live around here? Or was it an Instagram reel that brought them? In the room’s center is a shared table, where two separate parties of four sit comfortably on either side, brushing shoulders with strangers. High bar chairs line a large window, from which pedestrians can be seen on the sidewalk, pausing to wonder the same thing that I did when I first walked by: why so blue?

Most of the wines, of which there are dozens, are French and available only by the bottle, which range in price from $68 to $120. As for the chicken, the waiter tells me it’s brined and marinated for two days in citrus juices, toasted peppercorns, rosemary and thyme before hitting the rotisserie. The citrus certainly comes through, but for the most part the meat is tender and savory atop its throne of roasted potatoes. The skin is crisp and umami-rich and comes sprinkled with fresh chives. The half-chicken is more than enough food for one. You can also get a full chicken, better for two people. But to get the best parts you may have to use your hands. So maybe not the choice for a second date. Although there’s something romantic about sharing a whole chicken, even if it is $58.

Location, Location, Location

BQE Admin on September 10, 2025

Borough president’s report highlights stark differences in access to education, health, and transit across BK nabes

The centerpiece of the “Comprehensive Plan for Brooklyn” is a borough-wide access to opportunity index, the darker green, the better. One particularly dire example: if you live in Borough Park, you’re expected to live 20 years longer than someone in East New York. Graphic via the report.

By Cole Sinanian

The Brooklyn Borough President thinks New York City is driving blind.

As one of the world’s only major metropolises without a comprehensive plan to guide long-term development, the City’s lack of cohesive vision results in yawning gaps in transit access, health outcomes and general wellbeing across its diverse neighborhoods, argues BP Antonio Reynoso in his updated “Comprehensive Plan for Brooklyn.”

Released last week, the plan draws attention to the stark inequalities between Brooklyn neighborhoods and offers potential solutions.

“For too long, NYC decision makers have been forced to make choices about development projects and resource allocations without this greater context,” Reynoso writes in the introduction. “We’ve seen time and again that planning issues do not occur in isolation, and we cannot solve entrenched problems on a site-by-site, or issue-by-issue, basis.”

Health and wellbeing — and the ways in which local infrastructure fails to provide it to many Brooklynites — feature heavily in the plan’s pages. Brooklyn’s average life expectancy of 80.7 years, for example, largely matches that of New York City, at 81.5, though life expectancies vary widely neighbor-to-neighborhood.

In parts of Brownsville, life expectancy at birth is 70.5 years. Meanwhile, a Borough Park native can expect to live nearly 92 years on average. Health data reveals a trend that quickly emerges over the course of the report: the lower-income, largely immigrant and nonwhite communities of Brooklyn’s southern and eastern quadrants are much worse-off than their fellow Brooklynites in the borough’s northern and western regions closest to Manhattan.

The highest rates of food insecurity, for example, can be found in Coney Island, Brownsville, and Gravesend, where 20-27% of the population is food-insecure, or lacking access to quality supermarkets and grocery stores. In Bed-Stuy and Sunset Park, fast food is overrepresented, with as many as 19 bodegas to a single supermarket.

Chronic diseases too more frequently plague eastern Brooklynites. The highest rates of adult asthma can be found in Brownsville, East New York, eastern Crown Heights, East Flatbush, and Canarsie, while the lowest are in northwestern Brooklyn and to the east of Prospect Park. Neighborhoods with large Latino populations like Ocean Hill, Cypress Hill, and Sunset Park, the report notes, have the borough’s lowest rates of health insurance coverage.

Some of the report’s health recommendations are in line with left-wing populist mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s policy proposals, namely city-operated grocery stores that would provide reduced-cost, nutritious food items located strategically in food-insecure neighborhoods like Bed-Stuy, Sunset Park, or East Flatbush. Local food pantries could also be partly supplied by the city, the report suggests, as many community-operated food pantries struggle to store and provide perishable food.

Environmental factors are related to local health outcomes, Reynoso’s report argues. In the south Brooklyn communities of Red Hook, Sunset Park, and East New York, a high concentration of last-mile delivery centers brings high truck volumes, which in turn leads to more traffic and local air pollution. Similarly, communities along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway like Williamsburg, Bushwick, Gowanus, Red Hook, and Sunset Park have the borough’s worst levels of air pollution.

As far as psychological health, residents of Brownsville, South Williamsburg, East New York, Sunset Park, Borough Park, and Coney Island were most likely to report two straight weeks of poor mental health. The City’s Behavioral Health Emergency Assistance Response Division (B-HEARD) sought to address this by routing mental health-related 911 calls to professionals better equipped to handle psychological crises than the NYPD, but, as Reynoso’s report details, B-HEARD has major gaps. It is not universally available, nor does it employ true mental-health professionals, instead relying on EMTs working for the NYPD and FDNY.

A central theme of the report is the relationship between community health, local transit infrastructure, and sustainability. More greenery, more bike lanes and CitiBikes, and new transit connections would help improve wellbeing in Brooklyn’s underserved neighborhoods. Despite its large park infrastructure, Brooklyn remains the borough with the lowest tree canopy coverage in the city, at just 18%. CitiBike infrastructure, while robust in north Brooklyn, is virtually non-existent in Coney Island.

Proposed projects like the long-delayed Interborough Express (IBX) would connect Broadway Junction and Sunset Park via the existing Bay Ridge Branch rail line, and provide a critical connection between Brooklyn and Queens. Other proposed transit developments include an updated in-system transfer between Lafayette Avenue and Fulton Street, which currently can only be done by exiting and re-entering the subway, and a connection between the underground Broadway G train stop and the elevated J and M trains.

And infrastructure projects could bring jobs and renewed industry to Brooklyn’s underserved areas. Reynoso’s plan supports the controversial Brooklyn Marine Terminal redevelopment (BMT), albeit with a focus on prioritizing maritime activity over housing. Potential for shipping and industrial jobs should be maximized, the report notes, with “no residential uses interfering with port and industrial activities…” Port activities at the BMT should be maintained, the report argues, as “the loss of Williamsburg’s industrial waterfront to housing development further underscores the need to preserve and expand Brooklyn’s remaining industrial waterfront.”

Brooklyn History: Was the BQE worth it?

BQE Admin on September 10, 2025

The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway under construction in Brooklyn. Photo via the Brooklyn Heights Association.

By Cole Sinanian

In a 2024 interview with the Governor’s Island-based nonprofit, the Institute for Public Architecture, architect and Bay Ridge native John di Domenico recounted life in his neighborhood before the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway:

“The block was very important to you as a child growing up,” he said, “and when summer came along you played games in the street, you played stoopball, stickball.”

It was the basic unit around which urban life was organized. One could imagine, then, the strife brought by its utter destruction when the BQE came through Bay Ridge in the 1960s.

“I think its biggest effect to a 10 or 11 year old was noting at the end of a school year that some students didn’t return because they had to relocate over the summer,” di Domenico said.

The BQE was the infamous New York City urban planner Robert Moses’ magnum opus, a sprawling, highway designed to cut car travel times between Brooklyn and Downtown Manhattan. Built from 1937 to 1964, there was scarcely a Brooklyn community spared from the BQE, which divided tight-knit neighborhoods and sent communities scattering— a demographic shift the borough has yet to fully recover from.

Now, decades after its visionary’s death, the highway is a noisy, crumbling relic of a bygone era. One particular section, the triple cantilever over Furman Street in the Brooklyn Heights, was at risk of collapsing under heavy traffic loads by as early as 2026, until the City reduced the number of traffic lanes from three to two. The City’s Department of Transportation has plans to spend $4 billion to rebuild it in 2029, although the project has brought up questions about the future of the BQE as a whole.

Part of the larger Interstate-278 route, Moses took charge of constructing the Brooklyn portion of the highway, beginning in Greenpoint in the 1950s. Construction passed through Williamsburg, then populated by mostly working class Eastern European, Italian, and Puerto Rican immigrants, according to architect and urban planner Adam Paul Susaneck in his blog, “Segregation by Design.”

After passing through the historic core of Downtown Brooklyn, the highway — cutting diagonally through the city’s grid-structured neighborhoods — dipped into South Brooklyn, where it severed the Red Hook Houses, then home to working-class Black and Italian-American communities, from the rest of the borough via what Susaneck calls a “massive, traffic-choked and exhaust spewing trench between it the rest of the city.”

All told, Moses’ projects from the 1920s-1960s would displace over 250,000 people. Although Moses promised to relocate displaced families to public housing projects, later studies found that the percentage of families actually relocated was minimal. As the BQE cut its way through Brooklyn, a pattern emerged, later identified by Robert Caro in his Moses biography, “The Power Broker.”

Caro writes: “If the number of persons evicted for public works was eye-opening, so were certain of their characteristics…Remarkably few were white. Although the 1950 census found that only 12 percent of the city’s population was nonwhite, at least 37% of the evictees and probably far more were nonwhite.”

It’s worth noting that Moses, the great champion of the highway, did not, according to Caro, have a driver’s license. Furthermore, he spent much of his time in the city being driven around in a “chauffeured limousine,” functioning as a sort of leathery, upholstered office.

“It was in transportation,” Caro writes, “the area in which RM was most active after the war, that his isolation from reality was most complete: because he never even participated in the activity for which he was creating his highways—driving—at all.”

All of this displacement and destruction for a highway that failed to make travel between Manhattan and Brooklyn quicker. In the modern era, traffic has only worsened, as variables that didn’t exist during Moses’ lifetime have stressed the 20th century structure. E-commerce has brought a surge in heavy delivery trucks and the pandemic led to a bump in car travel in the city. Traffic on the BQE, as New York Times reporter Winnie Hu explains in a 2022 interview, seems to be compounding on itself, making for ever-slower, more frustrating travel:

“There have been complaints about more truck traffic in neighborhoods around the B.Q.E. as trucks and cars have gotten off the highway, looking for alternative routes on local roads when the B.Q.E. was backed up.”

Was it all worth it? di Domenico isn’t so sure.

“All of this was the result of this notion that moving across the city was so important, and that the end justified the means,” di Domenico said. “That it was getting through New York that was really important, even if it meant destroying all these individual neighborhoods along the way.”

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